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Why do you stay in Polygamy when it’s so Painful? Q&A

Question: Why do you stay in this relationship and allow him to hurt you like he does over and over. Clearly you are really not adapting all that well! I feel so much bitterness and anger coming from you – alot of it directed at the religion when instead it should be directed straight towards your husband who has used the religion as an excuse to DESTROY your marriage! Sometimes love is just not a good enough reason to stay in a relationship, especially when the entire relationship is so caustic! And actually if you two staying married to each other is because you “love” each other so much that you can’t end your marriage – yet you are still able to do things that hurt each other so deeply on a regualar basis – really? – who needs that kind of love???

Answer: Whoo – some good questions there! I’ll try my best to give you a truthful answer.

Why do I stay? As you say, love is not really explanation enough. I met my husband when I was very young, we married while we were still in university. My life has mainly been about him and our family. My parents died in a car-crash many years ago. They loved my husband, and he loved them. Loosing them was devastating. My brother died in 2011. He and my husband used to be best friends, until my husband became polygamous. My brother couldn’t forgive that. Anyway, my family is gone. When my brother died, I felt lost. Family has always been nr 1 in my life. Loosing my brother too was, well, I don’t really know how to explain it, it felt like my roots were gone, chopped off.

Together with my husband, they come alive. He loved them too. We can talk about them together, remember them and keep their memory alive. I need that badly.

I share a lifetime of memories with my husband. He is the father of my children, the man I had planned to grow old with. Does any of this make any sense? I am less alone with him than I am with anyone else. This is more than love. It’s life. I’m sorry, but I don’t know how better to explain it.

Angry and bitter – yes I am. Some days more than others, but it’s always there.

I do direct it at him sometimes. I know that’s where I should place the blame. And I do.

Am I directing it at his religion? Yes I am. I never cared much about religion earlier in my life. I’m really a typical agnostic, tolerant liberal when it comes to religion. However:

When my husband told me he had become polygamous he gave me a lot of explanations, excuses, and they were all based on religion. The things he told me were so unfair, so nauseatingly unjust, patriarchal and disgusting that I simply couldn’t believe he was telling the truth. So, I went to a London mosque and met a family councillor there, an imam.

I saw a sci-fi a couple of years ago, about aliens who wanted to take over the planet. The aliens were some kind of goo and it clung on people, and when they tried to break free they just got covered in more killer goo. That’s what I felt like when I talked to the imam.

He told me that a man is not required to ask his first wife’s permission to marry a second. I said my husband hadn’t even told me until 2 months later, and he said that is a man’s right. I said that the worse thing maybe was being lied to, is a husband allowed to lie to his wife about something as huge as this?, and the imam said that it is recommended a husband lie to his wife if that keeps her in a good mood. I said I couldn’t stand the thought of my husband touching me when he had been with her, and he said it was not my right to refuse – a husband has an absolute right to sex whenever he wants. If I refused, my husband has a god-given right to beat me. I said I wanted a divorce, and the imam said I would not be granted a divorce, because in islam the husband decides about divorce and I had no right to divorce my husband for doing something permissable. I said I had heard that islam didn’t really allow polygamy any longer because the quran says something about only doing it if you can be absolutely fair between the wives, and nobody can be absolutely fair between the wives. The imam said that fairness only applies to money and time. A husband will love one wife more, and that is allowed. And so it went on and on, and which ever way I turned, islam covered me in more goo – more sticky, alien, toxic killer-goo. There is always a rule in islam giving the man a right that his wife has to pay the price for… Women have NO rights in islam, except for the right to be credited with half the legal status of a man, the right to be beaten by her husband, the right to have her children taken from her because they belong to the husband and so on…:(

If you surf the internet, you will find that it is full of women, hurting indescribably because of polygamy. Women (and children) who are paying the horribly painful price for their husbands’ claiming some medieval, islamic right to treat women as non-humans and sex-slaves. You will also find women out there who are helping and defending these men, who are coping with polygamy by aiding their abusers, suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

These women make me hateful. Every woman who submits to forced polygyny, who aids and abets in this abuse, gives a license to men to commit the crime of forced polygyny on another innocent woman. These women are like the male members of the men’s auxiliary of SCUM… They are toxic goo….

I hope I have given your questions answers that are to some degree comprehensible.. 🙂

I thank you, Marie, for making me reflect on these important aspects of my life. It helps!

Hello and welcome! In a way I agree with you. However, I do hold a legal marriage license, and we both believe in our vows. I am also, technically, a child of the book, since I have been baptized long ago. I agree none the less that no non-muslim woman should ever marry a muslim. That however leaves all muslim women in the muck, so it doesn’t solve anything.